A couple of weeks ago, my university published a nice and substantive Q&A writeup regarding my Fulbright sabbatical time in Colombia. This prompted a few colleagues to inquire about the Fulbright experience from a process perspective. As I started to write detailed responses, I figured it might be worthwhile to turn them into an open blog post. So here are my personal lines of thoughts, processes, and experiences with the Fulbright program, vis a vis the sabbatical I took through my university. I’ll caveat that these thoughts, processes, and experiences are solely mine as a Fulbright Scholar in the 2023-24 cohort through Fulbright Colombia and may not be indicative of others’ in the past, present, or future thoughts, processes, or experiences with any particular Fulbright experience or program. Each application is unique and each experience is unique; I can only speak on behalf of my own.
To start, I applied as a Fulbright Scholar in conjunction with my first post-tenure sabbatical application. I planned to attempt my research project, regardless if I was accepted for a Fulbright or not. However, I’m almost certain I would have been significantly resource-constrained had I not gotten a Fulbright award. And as a result, I don’t think I would’ve accomplished nearly as much as I did during my sabbatical. So I’m definitely glad I applied to Fulbright and grateful they awarded me the opportunity for the exchange because it was profoundly beneficial for me in several ways:
- Post-tenure, I’d been struggling to stay motivated with several of the pre-tenure research projects I was working on. Thematically, I have a wide variety of interests in the context of marketplace justice and consumer ethics. But, I’ve long wanted to research the coffee industry as a proxy for these issues (anyone who knows me or read my prior post knows it is my neurodivergent “special interest”), so this sabbatical was an opportunity to start making that contextual pivot in my work.
- Post-tenure, I wanted to pivot from survey/experiments (the majority of my training and research record to date) to qualitative methods. I’ve long found consumer culture theory papers that use qualitative methods as some of the field’s most insightful, unique, and probably most fitting for the way my mind works. But I had only took a singular course way back in the PhD program, so this sabbatical was an opportunity to start making that methodological pivot in my work.
- Traveling to coffee origin for my sabbatical allowed me the opportunity to take advantage of resources and context on the ground that I couldn’t have gotten in Massachusetts. I’ve talked to many people over the years on this US consumer side of the industry– roasters, importers, cafe owners– but never before been to the production side of the industry. I needed to be able to travel to apply new methods to a new context for me.
From a practical perspective, getting the Fulbright award in tandem with my sabbatical meant I did not have to worry about teaching at my university. The union contract at my university allows us to apply for a sabbatical every six years– either for a full year sabbatical at 50% salary or a half-year sabbatical at 100% salary. For personal reasons, I applied for a half-year sabbatical, so everything from the sabbatical perspective was as though I was at my university– salary, benefits, etc.
All of this describes how I came to terms with planning sabbatical at my university. Insofar as the host and program expectations for applying for a Fulbright… my considerations went something like this:
I have young kids, so factoring my family needs into my Fulbright decisions were important. Fulbright Scholar programs are a minimum of 3 months with a maximum of 12 months. Since I only applied for a half-year sabbatical, and since my kids were still going to be in school at that time (and since my wife works in a school), it would’ve been impractical for them all to accompany me. Additionally, we all had concerns about the safety of living in Colombia given its history and my lack of experience in South America (and Spanish). My wife and I consensed around a 4 month compromise– that way, I could be in Colombia during the semester, yet return home for my kids’ end-of-school types of activities. (I got back the evening before my son’s school recorder concert.) And I was especially grateful that my parents took my family (and my sister and brother-in-law) down to visit me for a week during their February school break… even though I got COVID for the first time a week after they left.
Each country’s program has its own award terms, conditions, etc., and you apply to an award in a particular country (or multiple countries, if those are the grant terms). I had no host institution/colleague in mind to start, so deciding on which country I would be interested in applying was the genesis of my process. I weighed applying to Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and a few other countries. etc. Ethiopia was on my list, as the terms of their grant award included a stipend, plus some additional research funds– and even would’ve paid considerably per child for them to attend an International School there. And the idea of being understand coffee production by tracing Yukro (the namesake coffee, not my cat) back to its original farms was an immensely exciting idea to me. However, Ethiopia is farther away than Colombia, my family wasn’t planning to accompany me, and a widespread domestic conflict was already arising for me to be going there myself. These were all practical considerations for my family and me, especially relative to my research questions. For the Fulbright Scholar in Colombia, the award was $1500 for my roundtrip airfare and a $3700/mo stipend (again, this was independent of my sabbatical salary/benefits). As well, the Fulbright program in Colombia had a commission office, which offered local support services and programming as needed; not all countries have a Fulbright Commission.
Around early August 2022– and with input from a colleague I know at another university who peer reviews Fulbright applications (all Fulbright applications are peer-reviewed before they’re organizationally reviewed)– I determined that I would apply for the Fulbright Scholar award from Colombia. Among the essays applicants need to submit explains why you are selecting that host country. I had to have several project-considered reasons why I was choosing Colombia. This was not difficult for me, as there were plenty of reasons why Colombia specifically was my country-of-interest. Along with this essay and a full project proposal, there were other essay prompts that asked me to elaborate on topics such as my cross-cultural flexibilities and how a Fulbright would help my career trajectory. One of my other good colleagues in my institution who was doing a full year Fulbright at a university in Paris that year also previewed with me some of her materials– especially the core Fulbright research proposal itself.
I didn’t yet have a host institution lined up though, so I started to put out feelers on LinkedIn if I knew anyone in my networks in any Colombia universities who might be able to help me out. One researcher at a university in the southern part of the country reached out to me (in Spanish), but he was working in a sensory analysis lab. I was more so looking for someone whose research background was aligned with my own. (I eventually got to meet this researcher and visit his lab later in my stay in Colombia.)
A colleague of mine at Montana State whom I’ve known from some time answered my query, suggesting someone at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá that he’d collaborated with. I searched the faculty bio and it turned out that we had attended the same Transformative Consumer Research Conference together multiple times, but had somehow never met. Given my intimate familiarity with TCR, I knew Andrés would be coming from a interest and research lens similar to mine, so it was exactly the type of collaboration I was looking for.
I reached out to him and we started chatting about my intended Fulbright project proposal and he expressed interest in working with me on it. He then secured me the necessary commitment letter from his dean to submit with my Fulbright application before the mid-September deadline. I should note that the Fulbright Commission in Colombia was also able to provide me some local university contacts to try and find collaborators (not every country has the resources of a Commission), but my organic LinkedIn networking ended up proving far better– especially since Uniandes is one of the top universities in Colombia. Additionally, the commission typically gets backed up with requests as the application deadline approaches, making it more challenging to connect with host institutions in a timely manner.
My particular grant required Spanish language proficiency evaluation as well, which was a challenge since my undergraduate minor was in French and I had no Spanish experience. Before I thought about applying, I started working through Duolingo Spanish, so when the time came for applying, I had a couple of words under my belt. In order to submit an evaluation, I asked a colleague in our World Languages department who was gracious enough to administer an OPI (Oral Proficiency Interview) test to me. Obviously, my skills were next to none and I was evaluated as Level 1. However, as I write in other posts, having prior second language background in a bilingual city not only helped me test at survival level in another Romance language, but it also helped me with familiarity with language immersive-environments. A number of my posts allude to this, as well as how little English was spoken outside my host institution, necessitating at least some Spanish skills. Along with the evaluation, the Fulbright application itself then had three prompts for me to answer specifically regarding my language skills.
All Fulbright Scholar applications are due in September and scholars can only apply for one Fulbright Scholar award per year. In October 2022, I applied to my university for a sabbatical. In December 2022, the university approved my sabbatical. And in March 2023, following peer-review and organizational review, I got my 2023-24 Fulbright acceptance letter to start in January 2024 to coincide with my sabbatical. By Fall semester 2023, I was already starting Fulbright orientation and immigration processes with Fulbright Colombia for visas, booking flights and Airbnb, ramping up my Duolingo Spanish, and reading more background both on Colombia and on qualitative methods.
As I said above, I would’ve attempted my research sabbatical project either way, but the Fulbright award gave me resources the sabbatical wouldn’t have on its own. If I did the sabbatical without the Fulbright, I probably would’ve spent two weeks in Colombia, everything would have been expensed to myself out-of-pocket, and I would have had an extremely difficult time trying to communicate with people through my minimal, survival-level Spanish. I am doubtful I would have gotten to visit coffee farms as I wanted to visit, and speak with people in the industry as I wanted to interview. My sabbatical gave me the time, but the Fulbright helped me significantly scale my efforts across that time, through funding and institutional networking.
As I also said above, I wanted to use the opportunity to pivot both my research context and my methods, so I didn’t really want to be teaching additional courses during my Fulbright grant period. In my Fulbright application, I proposed a split of 90% research and 10% teaching. This was unique to my proposal, as some Fulbright Scholars may re-weight their obligations differently; some folks may only teach at a host institution, while others may be more balanced in their obligations.
For my teaching component, I created a social media marketing class module to “leave” Uniandes faculty to use in their own courses. At Uniandes, I taught that module in two Marketing Research courses, I taught a pricing class in a Marketing Principles course, and I co-led a class in a PhD research methods course. And then at the end of my four months, I presented a capstone seminar of my emergent findings to their School of Management. The rest of the time, I spent reading methods, learning some Spanish being around the city, conducting informant interviews, visiting field sites around the country, and still working on other obligations in process.
The result of my Fulbright yielded 30 informant interviews, fieldwork observations at 5 farms (plus other sites like roasteries, sensory labs, etc) in 4 cities outside of Bogotá, and hundreds of photos– all as a corpus of qualitative data. My colleague there was extremely beneficial in leveraging his local networks and getting contacts there for us to interview/visit. Plus, he is Colombian, so he was able communicate in native Spanish, while his PhD from the UK meant he speaks fluent English. Plus we understood each others’ backgrounds. So conducting the research was truly collaborative. I’m now learning from him how to rigorously analyze the qualitative data so we can start developing from them. And we anticipate that we can get a minimum of 3 unique, high-quality manuscripts out of the present data, and possibly another 3-4 lesser manuscripts that would need yet more data to improve their quality. And I would love to take that all and write a non-academic book as well. It also got me thinking that I’d like to develop a Markets & Society course at my own university.
Since entering the Fulbright Scholar program, there are other Fulbright programs I’ve come to better understand as an alum. For example:
- Whereas the Fulbright Specialist program is a 2-6 week program, the Fulbright Scholar which is 3-12 months.
- Whereas the Fulbright Specialist, an applicant pitches themself as a specialist for projects that other host institutions are looking for help with (e.g., they can get institution to write a proposal that effectively “matches” with them), the Fulbright Scholar is basically entirely the applicant’s own proposal.
- Whereas the Fulbright Scholar applications are all due in September, the Specialist programs have a couple different application opportunities throughout the year.
- Whereas applicants are only eligible to for a Fulbright Scholar award every 5 (?) years after receiving one, they’re eligible every 2 years after receiving a Specialist award.
- The Scholar and Specialist programs, criteria, applications, and appliction reviews are independent of each other.
- There are other programs such as the Global Scholar program, the Public Policy Fellowship, and so on.
Given my positive experience with the program, my successes in accomplishing my proposal objectives, and my anticipation of future research (as well as getting acclimated with living in Colombia), and since my family now is at sleepaway camp during the summers, I am heavily considering applying to a Fulbright Specialist award in the not distant future so I can go back to Colombia to continue my collaborative work down there.
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